


Courtship in the Modern Era

by esanabridges



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-09
Updated: 2019-04-09
Packaged: 2020-01-07 04:57:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18403562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/esanabridges/pseuds/esanabridges
Summary: Brienne is trying to study. Jaime wants to talk.





	Courtship in the Modern Era

"I'm not bothering you, am I, Lady Blue?"

The words, pitched in a too-sweet tone meant to be grating, were made even more annoying by the presence of batting, blond eyelashes and an easy, hooked grin. Brienne gritted her teeth and then immediately un-grit them. Any show of annoyance would be seen as weakness by the inhumanly handsome shark standing over her desk.

"It's fine," she said in the most neutral tone she could muster and without looking up. Eye contact would just make things more difficult. "Though our professor does have office hours right now, too, and he is our professor for a reason."

"Yes," her companion agreed, "But I can't see the sea in his eyes."

She jerked back at that, partially away from his physical form and partially away from the words themselves. Red rushed through her skin, and she found that the movement now had her looking directly into Jaime Lannister's gently teasing eyes.

It was always like this, or at least it had been since they had started _Controversies in Anthropology_ three months ago. She had no idea why Tywin Lannister's oldest son would deign to take an upper-level anthropology class or how he'd even gotten enough credits to qualify or - and this one was certainly the most puzzling - why he took every available opportunity to goad her into speaking.

Brienne could talk - she had gotten over the stage fright back in high school - but she mostly preferred to let other people argue, especially since most of her classmates weren't really looking to change their minds, and her professor could always judge her on her papers. It was difficult to stay indifferent to the discussions when Jaime always seemed to be talking directly to her.

He wasn't even cruel, the way that Brienne knew most of the attendees of King's Landing University were - money and endless nannies took a toll on the morality and personality of a child, and even the better ones found it hard to say nice things about a girl who didn't even wear makeup. It was truly horribly confusing all around.

As urgently as she had un-grit her teeth, Brienne looked back down at the papers in front of her. In her head, she counted to five, took a deep breath, and then responded, "I don't think that that's really going to help you learn anything." She tapped her fountain pen on the paper a couple times to find her place and then added, "Margaery is here, somewhere, if you want to look at blue eyes."

"Nah," Jaime replied dismissively. He let the door to the study room close behind him, hooking his ankle around the chair next to her and dragging it out before lowering himself into it as royally as a king. "I prefer yours."

She stomped on the warm feeling that began to bubble up at the thought that anyone might think anything about her was better than anything about Margaery with a very cold, hard reminder of what had happened the last time she took a boy's compliments seriously. Instead of smiling bashfully, Brienne kept her face expressionless, twirled her pen, and said back in her driest tone, "I'm honored."

Jaime inclined his head magnanimously and propped his elbows on the desk, neatly avoiding Brienne's notes. He considered the library through the study room's glass wall. From where they were situated, they could see rows of long bookshelves, with some occupied desks in the distance. "Did you see they restarted excavation at Hellholt? They think they're getting closer to finding Queen Rhaenys' body."

"They always think that," Brienne pointed out, though she had to admit that the activities at Hellholt intrigued her. The age of King Aegon I and his sister-wives Visenya and Rhaenys had been fraught with battle and hardship, she knew, but there was something almost mesmerizing about the thought of dragons soaring overhead and bonding with their chosen. Still - "We don't even know if she died there."

"You think she lived?" Jaime asked. He leaned forward until his shadow was hovering over her textbook and his voice was conspiratorially tickling her cheek. "You think after Meraxes was shot through the eye by a scorpion and tumbled from the sky, she could have hung on _and_ avoided being crushed by a dying dragon?"

Brienne shrugged and pretended to check a footnote, ignoring cologne aura around Jaime. It was not really a scent she liked, but no doubt expensive and very in keeping with everything else about him. "I don't know," she answered honestly. "But she loved flying. This can't have been the first time she fell."

"Yeah, but how many of those times were off a dying dragon?" Jaime shot back. His eyes were gleaming, as if he could see the scene before him.

"She could have bailed," Brienne replied. The top of her scalp tingled when she held Jaime's gaze, and she did her best to not show it. "Falling is falling, and someone who rode as much as she did probably had a contingency plan."

"What are you thinking? Homemade parachute? Paraglider? Oh, maybe made from scales that Meraxes had lost?"

His words should have been mocking, but try as she might, Brienne could find no malice in them. It was almost frustrating how earnest he seemed, almost like a kid rereading one of his favorite storybooks.

It was endearing enough that she couldn't quite hide a smile. "Something like that."

"Oh, a smile," and he was back at her with a wide one of his own. "That's a nice look on you, Lady Blue." There was that warmth again, and it was harder to crush this time. "Alright, so Meraxes was shot, and Rhaenys leapt from his back and paraglided herself to safety?"

She considered the posit for a moment and then shook her head. "No."

"No?" Jaime's eyebrows shot up.

"No," she repeated. "Rhaenys loved flying, and she loved Meraxes. I think that if her dragon was going to die, she would have chosen to die with him."

Jaime sat back in his chair, arms going into a fold over his chest. The smile shrank and then came back with a vengeance, this time filled with something that Brienne might have branded fond if it had come from one of her friends. 'Fond' was too familiar a word to describe someone like Jaime.

"You're a romantic," Jaime observed, the grin opening up his entire face. "You love the old stories, don't you?"

A little tartly, because it was really only the fact that she was as red as it was physically possible to be that kept her from blushing further, Brienne replied, "I think that's a big part of anthropology." She paused, looked down at her notebook and considered flipping to a fresh page. It would be a good way to end the conversation, and this was a fair stopping point anyways… but then Jaime would take his smile away, and she couldn't say that that open, fresh smile wasn't worth something to her.

"Why did you pick it?" She kept her page trained on the page before her, pen poised.

"Anthropology?" Jaime shrugged. "The evolution of tradition is wild."

Brienne was unable to suppress a snort at his choice of words, and she was rewarded with another wide grin, though this one seemed a bit distracted. "Do you have something specific in mind?"

There was another shrug, and Jaime was back to crowding her space. "Take, for example," he began, one hand shifting in a wild demonstration of his words and narrowly missing her head, "Tournaments."

"We still have those," she pointed out, mostly because she knew how he would react.

He responded as predicted, with a dismissive flap of the hands. "Sports - not jousting or sword fighting or combat."

"Sometimes fencing."

He paused. "Hm. That is true. But no one dies in fencing."

"Most tournaments didn't involve dying either," she replied, biting back another snort.

"But the chance was higher." He waited for her to incline her head in acknowledgement and then plowed ahead. "And it was accepted. If someone died in tournament, it was a tragedy, but people knew that that was the risk that came. If people died in a tournament today, the news wouldn't be able to just talk about 'lax proceedings' and 'a need for changes in regulations'."

She put her pen down - the studying ship had cleared sailed off without her - and nodded again. "Sure. They'd want to shut the whole thing down. I don't know if that's 'wild' though. Generally, everyone wants to die less."

"Fair enough," Jaime conceded with a limp flap of the wrist. "But that's not my main issue."

"Oh?" She lifted her eyebrows in an imitation of one of his favorite gestures. "What is?"

He lifted a finger in a 'wait' symbol and disappeared out the study room door and through the bookshelves briefly before returning with a large tome. Brienne was briefly caught up in that image. It was strange to think, but Jaime looked best when armed with a book. He was almost never not carrying one, usually propped up on his shoulder like some character out of a drama, and he loved to reference them or lend them out, especially, it seemed to her, to prove his point. She wasn't quite able to see the title before he laid it on the table, flipped through, and then rotated it so that she could see the page clearly.

Brienne looked down at a drawing of a beautiful young woman sitting in the stands of a tournament audience, bowing her head to accept a wreath of green leaves interlaced with delicate, purple flowers from a knight in full armor astride a tall steed. She extended a hand to trace the caption below, which read, "The victor of the tournament presents his wife with a wreath, symbolizing the crowning of the Queen of Love and Beauty."

She looked up through her lashes at Jaime, frowning. "'The Queen of Love and Beauty'? This is your main issue?"

" _Yes_ ," Jaime said emphatically, "Because once upon a time, when you wanted to court someone, all you had to do was win a tournament and give them one of these." He tapped on the page, hand lingering next to hers. "We don't have that luxury - _I_ don't."

 _So he has someone in mind._ The back of her neck tingled, and Brienne raised a hand absently to rub the skin, trying to chase away the feeling of discomfort that had just risen. "Yes, how horrible, now you actually have to _talk_ to the person."

Jaime's eyes flickered to follow the movement of her hand and then came back up to her. "If only it was that easy. Talking doesn't prove you're serious."

"It might if you weren't so sarcastic," Brienne pointed out. "Just tell them you're serious."

Her companion sat back in his chair, hand sliding across the wood of the table. Jaime crossed one ankle across the other knee and folded his arms across his chest. "Okay. I bow to your wisdom, Lady Blue." He paused, tilted his head, and then, in an even level said, "I'm serious."

Brienne stared at him. The tingling at the nape of her neck was growing. "What?"

"I'm serious," Jaime repeated. "I'm serious about you. Will you go out with me?"

In her mind's eye, she could see the face of a smiling boy, not nearly as handsome as Jaime, but earnest and sweet and genuinely interested in her - except he hadn't been, not any more than any of the other boys who had gambled on her first time.

Brienne stood up, the movement so abrupt that the chair was toppled to the floor. If her cheeks had been red before, she knew they must be near magenta now. Tears were welling up, though she couldn't tell exactly what emotion was evoking them. She blinked rapidly and glared at Jaime.

"That's not funny."

Jaime shrugged, pushing the chair back onto two legs to look up at her. "It's not meant to be."

Words fought themselves within Brienne's mind, and in the end, she could only say, "I thought you weren't cruel." She slammed her notebook shut, shoving it into her backpack.

Jaime let out a sigh. "I told you this would be easier if we still had real tournaments," he said reproachfully. He let the chair tumble back to the ground and turned to rummage in his own backpack. "Still, maybe it's a good thing they don't exist because I would never be able to give you the wreath."

The words stung, even as Brienne reminded herself that they shouldn't. He was just another dumb boy, maybe a little better with his words than the last one, but dumb nonetheless. His opinion was worthless.

"I don't need a wreath," she snapped back.

"No," Jaime agreed, coming out with a rectangular black box with nothing on it. "You don't." He considered the box for a moment, before pushing it across the table. "Please," he added when she just looked at it. "Even if you throw it back into my face. I'd like you to see it."

Brienne stared at the box, mind ticking through the possibilities, before reluctantly pulling it towards her. She gingerly pulled the lid off, holding it away from her body in case anything was getting ready to jump out.

Inside was a small sword - _no_ , Brienne thought as she took a closer look. It was a pen, a beautiful gold fountain pen that had a cap carved into a lion with ruby eyes, and more carved lions danced along the barrel. The metal of the regulator, when she uncapped it, rippled black and red, and just holding it, she could already feel how beautifully balanced it was.

"You have to choose someone from the crowd to give the wreath to." Jaime's soft voice brought her back to his eyes, serious and solemn and almost sweet. "Given that your most likely place in a tournament would be competing against me (and losing), I couldn't give you the wreath."

"So this…?" Brienne asked quietly. Her heart was starting to pound against the inside of her chest again, though the beat wasn't quite as distressing as it had been just moments before.

He smiled. "If there were still tournaments, I would have given you a sword. Nowadays, I think you might find a pen more useful." Jaime leaned in to whisper conspiratorially. "Plus, I think campus security might get a bit pissed if I came into the library with a giant sword." He got up from his chair and crossed the room, plopping himself down on the table next to where she stood. "This is my wreath for you. Do you think I'm serious now?"

The metal was cool in her hand, her fingers unconsciously tracing out the lions. She shook her head, a little disbelieving. "Jaime…"

Jaime offered her a hand, and Brienne took it with her free one. "Lady Blue," he said, eyes dancing, "Brienne. I'm serious about you. I'd like to court you - Professor Targaryen is sponsoring a trip to the Hellholt dig. Will you come with me? As a date?"

It was hard to know the feeling blossoming in her chest, fizzy and warm and bright, and Brienne found that she was smiling without even realizing it. She ducked to try to cover her face, but Jaime was holding one of her hands, and her other held the glorious pen. When she looked at him, Jaime was grinning at her, eyebrows still raised in question.

"I think the smile is a good sign," he remarked. "But I'd still like an answer."

She snorted and shook her head. "Yeah," she mumbled, unable to stop beaming. "I will." And then, because she needed to conserve her pride, she added, "And I would win."

"Win what?"

"The tournament." She swallowed and licked her lips. "If we went up against each other. I would win. And I don't care if it's not traditional. I'd give you the wreath."

Jaime chuckled, the sound filling her like the sun. He slid off the table and bowed deep at the waist. "Well, Lady Blue, I would be honored to be your King of Love and Beauty."


End file.
